Accidentally discovered compassionately tutoring minority kids, Larry Wilkerson (splendid in maroon suspenders) poses for the admiring camera of the Washington Post.

The occasion was a lengthy exercise in puffery establishing (Colin Powell’s former State Department chief of staff) retired Colonel Larry Wilkerson as a great man, after which the hero climbs down from his monument, and goes to work bashing the Bush Administration.

One former commander is quoted saying of Wilkerson:

He is the most principled individual I have ever met and ever worked with. He is a remarkable guy with essentially no ego.

No ego? It must have been somebody else who “offered tart and colorful opinions” on adversaries within the administration, and said Powell was tired “mentally and physically,” in a May 2004 GQ interview which went all sorts of places Secretary of State Powell was unwilling to go, and which left egg all over his boss’s face.

Does someone with no ego boast openly to the Washington Post of his Vietnam combat service nearly forty years ago, and indulge in (what even the Post refers to as) a “predictable aside on hawks like Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz:”

“None of these guys ever heard a bullet go by their ears in combat.”

Do individuals with no ego commonly describe the President of the United States as “inept” and “unsophisticated?”

What we really find here is a preening snob whingeing bitterly about the unworthiness of his former superiors. And it’s always touching to observe the sterling character of those members of the liberal establishment who alert the media whenever they perform a charitable act.

All the admiring verbiage in the Post concerning Wilkerson’s alleged restraint since leaving the administration is more than a little disingenuous. Wilkerson has been on the war-path against the Bush Administration for months, making a wide round of public appearances and doing press interviews in which he has leveled any number of sensational and highly partisan charges.

Previously discussed Guardian interview.
———————————————————————
Hat tip to Reid Detchon (on my College Class email list).

New National Geographic article.

Previous

Jeff Goldstein links evidence from Daily Kos, via Ian Schwartz.

Urban dwellers like their experiences of Nature pre-packaged and predictable, and anything out of the ordinary will invariably throw them into a tizzy. The Press will emotionalize the situation and self-importantly opine. The government will step forward, inform everyone that it’s in charge, and proceed to do something designed to make itself appear necessary.

The latest collision of Nature with urbanized humanity is occurring in London, where—as the BBC reports—a 16-18 foot Northern bottlenose whale (Hyperoodon ampullatus) for reasons of its own has swum up the Thames directly through the heart of London.

The Press is describing the event as unprecedented, but one suspects that the same species probably visited the Thames fairly regularly before Industrialization rendered the river inhospitable to cetean visits. Contemporary environmental measures (and the outsourcing of industrial activity to more remote regions) have obviously made the Thames cleaner today than it has been for a couple of centuries.

Concerned authorities and solicitous private well-wishers are hovering around the whale (accompanied by media helicopters), trying to prevent its stranding itself, overlooking the fact that bottlenose whales make a regular practice of doing precisely that in all the Northern European waters they frequent. See this Faroese account.

MSN video

Allan Poster’s 1968 Corvette, stolen in New York in 1969, has been found and returned to him in California.

Spengler argued against John Keegan’s optimism regarding the inevitability of Western victory in Asia Times shortly after 9/11:

The grand vulnerability of the Western mind is horror. The Nazis understood this and pursued a policy “des Schreckens” (to cause horror) and “Entsetzens” (terror, literally: dislodgement). Horror was not merely an instrument of war in the traditional sense, but a form of Wagnerian theater, or psychological warfare on the grand scale…

America, as Osama bin Laden taunted this week, lost in Vietnam. But it was not military setbacks, but the horrific images of Vietnamese civilians burned by napalm, that lost the war. America’s experience in the war is enshrined in popular culture in the film Apocalypse Now, modeled after Joseph Conrad’s story, The Heart of Darkness. The Belgian trading company official, Paul Kurtz, sinks into bestiality and dies with these words: “The horror! The horror!”...

From America’s moral collapse in the face of the horror of Vietnam, there arose a repudiation of classical Western culture unlike anything seen previously in the English-speaking world….

...how can Al-Qaeda overcome the West with horror? Let us suppose that some state or state agency over which Al-Qaeda wields influence possesses a weapon of mass destruction, with sufficient potency to cause a very large number of deaths in a Western country. If it deploys that weapon and causes a very large number of casualties, the West may have no choice but to bombard the offending country with nuclear weapons and destroy its capacity to make war. Given that Al-Qaeda has tendrils deep in numerous governments, even a nuclear bombardment of one rogue state might not diminish its capacities. The West would be left with the horrific fact of mass destruction of civilians combined with continued insecurity.

Time is on the side of Al-Qaeda…

...the West should think of itself as the underdog, fighting against the clock, and seize the tactical initiative. It should act unpredictably, with the objective of confusing and disrupting an enemy who until now has chosen his targets at leisure… the West should act unexpectedly and without mercy against states which allow Al-Qaeda. There is no need to go into details here. Doing so now offers at least the chance of gaining the respect of the Islamic world. Failing to do so makes probable a gradual accumulation of failures. It means that the war will be Al-Qaeda’s to lose.

We were lucky with Hitler. We may not be so lucky again.

George W. Bush should have pinned this article on the wall above his desk. He was right to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, but he allowed the War against Terrorism to lose momentum. Syria should have been invaded and its regime dismantled immediately after Iraq. We should have invaded Iran long ago.

Thomas Lifson at American Thinker rubs it in:

Yesterday, we caught Slate cluelessly recycling the fake photo the New York Times posted to its home page last Saturday. In less than an hour, Slate removed the photo without comment. Then AT pointed out their lack of decency in failing to acknowledge their publication of a fake. Slate eventually added a paragraph explaining their error.

Time Magazine needs to broaden its sources, though. It repeated the same error, as noticed by blogger The Spirit of Entebbe and several emailers.

The MSM, which is best referred to as the antique media, have a general disdain for the blogosphere, often citing their own “fact checkers” and layers of editors. It turns out that the peer review function of the blogosphere, lnked by instantaneous email and suffused with the ethic of admitting and correcting mistakes, is far, far more effective than the creaky 19th century bureaucratic model in use at places like Time Magazine, and even websites like Slate staffed with antique media personnel.

The antique media death spiral accelerates.

And who can blame him?

Jack Kelly at Real Clear Politics reports a possible terrorism connection the MSM studiously overlooks:

Last month Italian authorities arrested three Algerians who were members of the al Qaida -linked terror group GSPC.

The three were plotting attacks on ships, railway stations and stadiums in the United States in a bid to outdo the casualties caused on 9/11, said Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu.

The arrests made front page news in newspapers in Italy, Britain and France. But apparently the only U.S. newspaper to mention them was the Philadelphia Inquirer, in a short AP dispatch on page A-6. The AP did not mention that the principal targets of the plotters were in the U.S.

The incuriosity of our news media about the plotters and their plots is curious, especially in light of the mysterious death of Joel Hinrichs, 21, a Muslim convert who, wearing a suicide vest, blew himself up Oct. 1 on a park bench outside the stadium in Norman where the university of Oklahoma football team was playing Kansas State. When Hinrichs’ apartment was searched after his death, the FBI found a plane ticket to Algeria.

Hat tip to AJStrata
——————————————————————————————-

And Thomas Joscelyn has an article in the Standard backgrounding the same al Qaeda-affiliated Algerian terrorist group, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC).

Andrew Cochran at the Counterterrorism Blog discusses news reports of a new Osama bin Laden tape broadcast by Al Jazeera offering a truce. If it really was bin Laden, this would be his first new broadcast since December 2004. He links also an Evan Kolhmann posting arguing against the likely veracity of the recent Michael Ledeen story of Osama’s death in December in Iran.
—————————————————————————————
Reuters reports that Major General Jay Hood, the US Guantanamo Bay commander, told the press yesterday that prisoners held at the US facility had provided important information on last summer’s UK bombings:

He said “a good, significant number” of mid-level al Qaeda associates were captured during the war in Afghanistan and held at Guantanamo and had discussed men they knew or trained who may have since moved up in the hierarchy of the militant Islamist group.

“Who knows those people better than anyone else? The people that were training them, the people that were preparing them for future roles in that terrorist organization,” Hood said.

He said the Guantanamo prisoners learned about the London bombings shortly after they occurred, probably from visiting lawyers who are challenging their detention in the U.S. courts.

“Most of the information available to detainees comes to them from their contacts with legal counsel,” Hood said.

Michelle Malkin thinks these lawyers’ relationships with terrorist prisoners will bear watching, asking “How many of those lawyers are the next Lynne Stewarts?”

“Never pick a fight you know you cannot win.” advises Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins.

Iran is a serious country, not another two-bit post-imperial rogue waiting to be slapped about the head by a white man. It is the fourth largest oil producer in the world. Its population is heading towards 80 million by 2010. Its capital, Tehran, is a mighty metropolis half as big again as London. Its culture is ancient and its political life is, to put it mildly, fluid…

I would sleep happier if there were no Iranian bomb but a swamp of hypocrisy separates me from overly protesting it. Iran is a proud country that sits between nuclear Pakistan and India to its east, a nuclear Russia to its north and a nuclear Israel to its west. Adjacent Afghanistan and Iraq are occupied at will by a nuclear America, which backed Saddam Hussein in his 1980 invasion of Iran. How can we say such a country has “no right” to nuclear defence?..

Iran is the regional superstate. If ever there were a realpolitik demanding to be “hugged close” it is this one, however distasteful its leader and his centrifuges. If you cannot stop a man buying a gun, the next best bet is to make him your friend, not your enemy.

Now what do you suppose Jenkins would have said in the period of 1936 to 1939 about Nazi Germany? One can only assume that poor fellow has been living in Paris for too long.

Mr. Jenkins ought to remember that, historically, large barbarian armies have done remarkably poorly against far smaller Western forces on numerous occasions.

The Persian experience of the overwhelming superiority of Western arms in ancient times at Thermopylae and Marathon, during the Retreat of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, and at Issus and Gaugamela will inevitably be repeated all over again today, if the Iranian regime persists in its course.

Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Army, though repulsed in its initial invasion of Iran, was still able to fall back, stand on the defensive, and battle Iranian military forces to a draw over the final six years of an eight year war. That same Iraqi Army was twice beaten by US forces virtually effortlessly in a matter of days. The disproportion of technology, of military capabilities, is so great that an Iranian Army confronting US forces would not be much better off than the Mahdi’s dervishes were facing Kitchener’s machine guns a century ago at Omdurman.

The US invasion of Iran can only result in one of history’s classic turkey shoots, as any Iranian forces which fail to surrender or flee would be quickly and efficiently annihilated by precision-directed American firepower. The Iranian military would have about the same prospects against contemporary American military forces that the ants in my front yard have against the garden pesticide sprayer.

Nor is it likely, for that matter, that the current brutal and tyrannical regime can expect so much loyalty from its own citizens that substantial portions of its Army and civilian population will fight for it to the death. Frankly, there is every reason to suppose that Iranians in general would welcome invading Americans as liberators, and the Revolutionary Islamic Dictatorship would collapse upon receiving a single blow. Overthrowing the present Iranian regime may, in all likelihood, prove about as difficult as kicking to pieces a rotten pumpkin.

The man who trained shoe-bomber Richard Reid, Zacharias Mousssaoui, hundreds of other terrorists, 52 year-old Midhat Mursi, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri, was one of the Al Qaeda leaders present at last Friday’s meeting in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier tribal district, slain in a Predator-drone missile strike directed by US Intelligence operatives. The US government had been offering a $5 million reward for Mirsi’s capture.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command, had been also been expected to be present at the targeted meeting, but is—so far—reported to have failed to attend.

ABC News report.
————————————————————————————
Meanwhile, AP is offering a rather confusing story by Riaz Khan, describing Pakistani Intelligence searching for missing bodies of the terrorist victims of last Friday’s missile strike.
————————————————————————————
Update

Reuters reports that Pakistani intelligence has identified two others of the slain terrorists. One was Abdul Rehman Al-Misri al Maghribi chief of al Qaeda’s media department, and a son-in-law of al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri. The other was Abu Obaidah al Misri, al Qaeda’s chief of operations in Kunar province, Afghanistan. The presence of Zawahiri’s son-in-law tends to suggest that he was indeed scheduled to be present. The fourth deceased terorist has allegedly not yet been identified.

Hat tip to John Hinderaker.

When we commented yesterday negatively on the Supreme Court decision in Gonzales, et. al. v. Oregon, we must confess that we had not yet gotten around to reading the actual decision. Nor were we familiar with the specifics of the Oregon law. Its title, the Oregon Death With Dignity Act (ODWDA), had precisely the ring of liberal double-speak to it, and we had leapt (understandably, we would argue) to the conclusion that the act basically encompassed oldsters going to the doctor’s office to be treated in the manner of the veterinarian putting to sleep the family cat. The reality was clearly quite different.

(The Supreme Court decision states:)

The Oregon Death With Dignity Act (ODWDA) exempts from civil or criminal liability state-licensed physicians who, in compliance with ODWDA’s specific safeguards, dispense or prescribe a lethal dose of drugs upon the request of a terminally ill patient.

Since our own position is really that any rational adult ought to be able to buy, and use, any medication or consciousness-altering item he desires without a prescription, it is clear that we failed to recognize initially the curious occurrence of the court’s liberal majority arriving at a perfectly correct decision.

Justice Scalia seems to have suffered from the same knee-jerk reaction we did initially, which was joined by Justices Roberts and Thomas. But Clarence Thomas additionally wrote a separate dissent, commenting sarcastically:

I agree with limiting the applications of the CSA [Controlled Substances Act] in a manner consistent with the principles of federalism and our constitutional structure. Raich, supra, at _ (THOMAS, J., dissenting); cf. Whitman, supra, at 486—487 (THOMAS, J., concurring) (noting constitutional concerns with broad delegations of authority to administrative agencies). But that is now water over the dam. The relevance of such considerations was at its zenith in Raich, when we considered whether the CSA could be applied to the intrastate possession of a controlled substance consistent with the limited federal powers enumerated by the Constitution. Such considerations have little, if any, relevance where, as here, we are merely presented with a question of statutory interpretation, and not the extent of constitutionally permissible federal power. This is particularly true where, as here, we are interpreting broad, straightforward language within a statutory framework that a majority of this Court has concluded is so comprehensive that it necessarily nullifies the States’ “ ‘traditional . . . powers . . . to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens.’ ? Raich, supra, at _, n. 38 (slip op., at 27, n. 38). The Court’s reliance upon the constitutional principles that it rejected in Raich—albeit under the guise of statutory interpretation—is perplexing to say the least. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.

In other words, Thomas still thinks the Constitution ought to preclude such Federal intrusions, but the since the Court already decided otherwise in Raich, what can he do but dissent from the tortured reasoning used to achieve a different result this time?
——————————————————————————————————
I was just telling my wife: I can remember being wrong once before. I think it was in 1954…

Wretchard notes how well H.G. Wells’ 1898 description, in his classic War of the Worlds , of mankind’s failure to detect signs, or conceive the possibility, of a Martian Invasion fits the failure of the Western democracies a century later to recognize a rising threat from closer to home, but very nearly as alien in its values and perspective (and indifference to the destruction of human life) as any Martians.

H.G. Wells described how complacent men could be in the presence of unseen but growing danger.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

With a few changes Wells’ paragraph could describe the mixture of smug amusement with which the Western intellectual elite watched the growing number of Wahabist mosques, the photography of landmarks, the application for flying lessons and the attendance at courses of nuclear physics by students from older worlds. They laughed, for nothing could threaten the dominion of Western Man, supreme in his socialized state at the End of History. Even after September 11 the only question for many was how soon history would return to normal after a temporary inconvenience. Little did they imagine that the expansion of the European Union, the Kyoto Agreements and Reproductive Rights—all the preoccupations of their unshakable world—might be the least of humanity’s concerns in the coming years.

Benjamin Franklin, born January 17, 1706 in Boston, is often referred to as “the first American.”

It was he who provided the classic model of the American self-made man (and autodidact), who first achieves personal independence by success in business, using it as his stepping-stone to worthier achievement in the realms of learning or of politics. And it was Franklin who first synthetized the characteristically American political blend of conservative skepticism with broadminded liberality, tempered by the businessman’s sense of practicality.

Franklin became rich as printer, publisher, and author, then with the leisure provided by the independence he had earned, turned his attention to experimental science. In the sciences, Franklin’s achievements were of international importance (he contributed greatly to the understanding of electricity), but probably even more important were the practical inventions which resulted from his experiments, or simply from his restless inclination toward problem-solving. We owe to Franklin: bifocal eyeglasses, the odometer, lightning rods, and the Franklin stove (among others), the last of which alone completely revolutionized the economy of domestic life.

In the struggle for American independence, Franklin, though the oldest, proved perhaps the most indispensable of the framers after Washington. He edited the draft of the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson. To Franklin’s scientific prestige, to his diplomatic abilities, and to his personal savoir faire and charm, we owe the French Alliance which made Revolutionary victory possible.

Franklin’s carefully crafted mature persona, the grandfatherly amiability artfully cloaking the deep and crafty intelligence, still proves a serviceable model for worldly and successful men to use to disarm potential opponents today. And it is Franklin’s own characteristic combination of superb practical competence allied to modesty and deprecatory humor, which defined our national version of sprezzatura.
——————————————————————

Franklin’s Autobiography

Christopher Hitchens reflects on Franklin in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Wikipedia summary

Dudley R. Herschbach

Some of his inventions

Franklin and lightning rods

Niall of the Nine Hostages, a High King of Ireland who flourished early-to-mid 5th century A.D., and whose raids on the coastline of Britain are conventionally credited with bringing Saint Patrick to Ireland as a captive slave, is the most likely source of Y-chromosomal DNA found by scientists to be shared by one in twelve Irish males, and an estimated 3 million men world-wide.

Reuters report, and abstract of paper (subscribers only) in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

New York Times

Link
—————————————————————————————————————-

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.

The US Supreme Court upheld Oregon’s Physician Assisted Suicide Law by a 6-3 vote.

In his recent novel No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy has the old timey Texas Sheriff Bell reminisce:

Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference in Corpus Christi and I got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talking about the right wing this and the right wing that… She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I dont like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I don’t think you got any worries about the way this country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she’ll be able to have an abortion. I’m goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she’ll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.

The negative opinion ofthe Supreme Court’s ruling implied by the use of the quotation has been retracted.

Southeast Asia News quotes other, more recent sources, indicating that Depkafile and the certain portions of MSM may have been mistaken. Even if Zawahiri is ultimately firmly established not to have been present, the Friday gathering in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier tribal district clearly did constitute the proverbial target rich environment, and US forces on the scene were clearly justified in firing on them.

Islamabad – Authorities in the Pakistani tribal region of Bajaur on Tuesday claimed that a controversial U.S. missile strike on the region last Friday killed ‘at least four’ foreign militants.

‘There is no doubt that 10 to 12 extremists including foreigners had been invited to a dinner,’ said a statement from Mohammad Faheem Wazir, senior official in Khar, the administrative centre of the Bajaur agency.

Based on the findings of a joint investigation team, the statement regretted the loss of civilian lives in the strike but said at least a dozen extremists including two Pakistani clerics wanted by the authorities were also present.

Archaeologists working in Bosnia are coming to accept local descriptions of a two thousand foot high hill in the vicinity of Visoko, northwest of Sarajevo, as a Bronze Age pyramid.

Archaeologists working in Visoko, Bosnia-Herzegovina, about 20 miles northwest of Sarajevo, discovered what might prove to be a European pyramid four times taller that the Great Pyramid of Egypt.

Bosnian archaeologist Semir Osmanagic, in an interview with the Associated Press, cautioned against jumping to conclusions, but preliminary investigations suggest some ancient culture, perhaps the Bronze Age Illyrian people, carved a natural hill into a pyramidal shape. The hill is 2,120 feet high and, according to Osmanagic, has “all the elements” of an artificial structure: “four perfectly shaped slopes pointing toward the cardinal points, a flat top and an entrance complex.”

Once the hill was shaped, it appears to have been faced with concretelike blocks made from an “unnatural mixture of gravel.”

Local residents long have referred to the hill as a pyramid, but no archaeologist seriously seems to have considered the possibility that the hill was in any way artificial until recently.

BBC News reports:

A parrot owner was alerted to his girlfriend’s infidelity when his talkative pet let the cat out of the bag by squawking “I love you Gary”.

The Telegraph provides a report that reminds the reader of John Buchan’s classic Greenmantle (1916), a thriller on the theme of the threat to European civilization posed by a plot to rally the Muslim world to rise in Holy War on behalf of an Islamic messiah. The Telegraph story suggests that the Iranian regime’s quest to build nuclear weapons, and inclination to confront the West, are products of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s mystical belief in the return of the Twelfth Imam at the End of Days.

Kenji Yoshino, Deputy Dean for Intellectual Life (which very title provokes sarcasm) and Professor at Yale Law School, has made a staggering new breakthrough in the ever-burgeoning Academic industry of the study of victimization’s infinite forms. Writing in a New York Times Magazine feature article (promoting a new book on the same subject), Yoshino recalls his own unhappy experiences:

When I began teaching at Yale Law School in 1998, a friend spoke to me frankly. “You’ll have a better chance at tenure,” he said, “if you’re a homosexual professional than if you’re a professional homosexual.”

It wasn’t long before I found myself resisting the demand to conform. What bothered me was not that I had to engage in straight-acting behavior, much of which felt natural to me. What bothered me was the felt need to mute my passion for gay subjects, people, culture.

It may strike many readers as an enviable enough fate to be a tenured Professor at Yale Law School, not to mention, Deputy Dean for Intellectual Life, but what real satisfaction can a chap derive from such trifles, when the reactionary prejudices of a cruel society will not grant him the right to allow his inner screaming queen to emerge and swish proudly in public in full daylight?

Long after I came out, I still experienced the need to assimilate to straight norms. But I didn’t have a word for this demand to tone down my known gayness.

Then I found my word, in the sociologist Erving Goffman’s book “Stigma.” Written in 1963, the book describes how various groups – including the disabled, the elderly and the obese – manage their “spoiled” identities. After discussing passing, Goffman observes that “persons who are ready to admit possession of a stigma. . .may nonetheless make a great effort to keep the stigma from looming large.” He calls this behavior covering. He distinguishes passing from covering by noting that passing pertains to the visibility of a characteristic, while covering pertains to its obtrusiveness. He relates how F.D.R. stationed himself behind a desk before his advisers came in for meetings. Roosevelt was not passing, since everyone knew he used a wheelchair. He was covering, playing down his disability so people would focus on his more conventionally presidential qualities.

As is often the case when you learn a new idea, I began to perceive covering everywhere. Leafing through a magazine, I read that Helen Keller replaced her natural eyes (one of which protruded) with brilliant blue glass ones. On the radio, I heard that Margaret Thatcher went to a voice coach to lower the pitch of her voice. Friends began to send me e-mail. Did I know that Martin Sheen was Ramon Estevez on his birth certificate, that Ben Kingsley was Krishna Bhanji, that Kirk Douglas was Issur Danielovitch Demsky and that Jon Stewart was Jonathan Leibowitz?...

The new civil rights begins with the observation that everyone covers.

One might expect serious resistance to a startlingly dramatic new notion of Civil Rights, to a new progressive demand for something far beyond mere tolerance of the forms of minority status which are innate or unchosen, which persons cannot ( or are believed, at least, to be unable to) do anything about, but Yoshino has considered this, and believes he has the answer.

When I lecture on covering, I often encounter what I think of as the “angry straight white man” reaction. A member of the audience, almost invariably a white man, almost invariably angry, denies that covering is a civil rights issue. Why shouldn’t racial minorities or women or gays have to cover? These groups should receive legal protection against discrimination for things they cannot help. But why should they receive protection for behaviors within their control – wearing cornrows, acting “feminine” or flaunting their sexuality? After all, the questioner says, I have to cover all the time. I have to mute my depression, or my obesity, or my alcoholism, or my shyness, or my working-class background or my nameless anomie. I, too, am one of the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation. Why should legally protected groups have a right to self-expression I do not? Why should my struggle for an authentic self matter less?

I surprise these individuals when I agree. Contemporary civil rights has erred in focusing solely on traditional civil rights groups – racial minorities, women, gays, religious minorities and people with disabilities. This assumes those in the so-called mainstream – those straight white men – do not also cover. They are understood only as obstacles, as people who prevent others from expressing themselves, rather than as individuals who are themselves struggling for self-definition. No wonder they often respond to civil rights advocates with hostility. They experience us as asking for an entitlement they themselves have been refused – an expression of their full humanity.

Civil rights must rise into a new, more inclusive register.

In the end, the School of Ressentiment proves universally inclusive. The answer to each and every individual id’s discontents with Civilization’s restraints is Universal Revolution. Everyone just needs to let his freak flag fly. For the Old Adam and the New Caliban alike, from the crudity of the lower classes to the depravity of the elite, all norms and standards must be swept aside, and any negative judgment of the self in any form or kind prohibited by the ideology of the new Enlightenment. A new liberated mankind will march forward into an idyllic future of self-realization and universal equality, just by each individual human being “being himself.” Koombayah!

The Times originally posted this picture, captioned: “Pakistani men with the remains of a missile fired at a house in the Bajur tribal zone near the Afghan border ” The same photo with corrected caption is now here.

Skeptics on Free Republic and Reason noticed that the photo actually featured an (unfired) artillery round. Thomas Lifson of American Thinker supplies the whole story.

One more instance of MSM misreporting has been debunked by the Blogosphere, and this one demonstrates all too clearly the unbecoming eagerness of the MSM to publish, in time of war, when US forces are operating under fire overseas, reports damaging to the reputation of American forces, reports calculated to manipulate the emotions of its readers in favor of the enemy. So eager is the liberal MSM to engage in this kind of journalistic treason that it will consistently publish uncritically, not only staged propaganda photographs like the one above, but also the most hostile and partisan characterizations of US war actions , and evaluations of their results, by foreign adversaries.

The often unreliable Depkafile is reporting that the CIA was fooled by an enemy disinformation operation. Depkafile claims that:

al Qaeda or Taliban had managed to plant a false lead with US intelligence by means of informers. This decoy operation had two objectives:

1. To confuse the commanders of the American forces hunting for bin Laden and Mullah Omar and expose their failure to penetrate al Qaeda’s top ranks.

2. To expose US pursuit tactics and uncover any American collaborators in their midst. The speed with which the news of the air raid appeared on US TV channels Friday night was a mark of the CIA’s certainty that this time it had hit one of its primary marks in the war on terror, Zawahiri.

DEBKAfile’s Special Correspondent in Pakistan reported earlier:

The target was a cluster of three houses owned by a jeweler named Abdul Ghafoor, whose relatives were among the victims.

The Pakistani authorities pointed out that in December, the Americans claimed to have killed Abu Hamza Rabia, a leading al-Qaeda operative, in an air strike in the Pakistani tribal area. However, the body was not produced, leaving the American claim in doubt.

DEBKAfile adds: Bajaur is one of the seven Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA running down the border with Afghanistan. These mountain areas, home to six million inhabitants, have long been used as sanctuaries and rear bases by Al Qaeda and Taliban.

This item is offered, not as a probably factual analysis to be believed, but simply as yet another rumor, evidencing the profusion of possible versions of what actually occurred in the case of one covert wartime action, whose facts we are unlikely to know any time very soon.

Can one imagine British and American papers during WWII operating in the fog of war during the uncertain aftermath of necessarily secret military operations happily publishing characterizations of Allied efforts by enemy spokesmen and echoing the viewpoint of the German press? Not very easily, but in our modern, more enlightened age, the MSM in both Britain and the United States has evolved an internationalist perspective, unburdened by patriotic loyalties, characteristically anti-America, anti-Bush Administration, and anti-Iraq War, which treats any murderous outrage by the forces of barbarism in the manner it would treat a particularly successful soccer play by a prominent visiting team, which carefully studiedly ignores Allied successes, and which makes a policy of publishing enemy allegations as factual news.

Under 48 hours after the US attempt to eliminate Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri by missile fire in remote tribal regions of Pakistan, the Guardian and the Washington Post pretend to have all the answers. There was a “botched operation” based upon “flawed intelligence” which resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians, including women and children. They know all this on the basis of the testimony of a combination of irate Islamic villagers, who—of course—would be among the hosts of targetted Al Qaeda terrorist commanders, and sundry Pakistani officials representing a government obliged in the circumstances created by precisely this kind of reporting to assume a posture of indignation in order to avoid bringing down upon itself the wrath of its own domestic Islamofascist sympathisers by appearing too closely aligned with Western governments.

Regrettably, the CIA is not in the habit of playing “Gotcha!” with the MSM, but they may have a good opportunity on this occasion. Earlier reports mentioned five terrorist bodies being carried off for further investigation. And even the New York Times quotes a senior Pakistani official as admitting that

11 militants had been killed in the attack. Seven of the dead were Arab fighters, and another four were Pakistani militants from Punjab Province, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the news media.

Whether Zawahiri was killed or not is obviously, at present, unknown, whatever local Pashtoons, Pakistani officials, the WaPo or the Guardian claim.

Earlier report
——————————————————————————————————————-

Today’s front-page coverage in the same papers, by some strange coincidence, accidentally overlooks the story of the rescue of a British free-lance journalist in Iraq by US forces.

The MSM had a field day emoting over the disaster, misreporting, and blaming Bush. Lisa of Bohemian Conservative links an illuminating perspective by Wilfred M. McClay:

Anyone who has ever lived in New Orleans recognizes the state of mind that prevailed before Katrina. That something like this could happen, and probably would happen, was utterly common knowledge. Equally known was that local officials were too corrupt and incompetent to manage a catastrophe. But a combination of fatalism and denial, and a good stiff drink, always served to banish the reality principle.

link
—————————————————————-

Hat tip to Ratty.

I was discussing the (indeterminate at this point) results of yesterday’s CIA attempt to nail al Qaeda number 2 man Ayman al-Zawahiri with a friend, who had not yet seen news of the previous day’s report by Michael Ledeen of the alleged death last month of Osama bin Laden. For his convenience, and those of any others who have not seen it, I am quoting, and linking, the story:

According to Iranians I trust, Osama bin Laden gave the world the most marvelous Christmas present he could possibly give by departing from it in mid-December. The Al Qaeda leader died of kidney failure and was buried in Iran, where he had spent most of his time since the destruction of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The Iranians who reported this note that this year’s message in conjunction with the Moslem Haj came from his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for the first time.

Edward Feser on TCS Daily responds to Jeffrey Hart’s recent essay which proposes uniting Burkean Conservatism with Pragmatism by evoking the memory of Richard Weaver’s (author of Ideas Have Consequences) Metaphysical Realism.

Hat tip to Jonathan Berry.

Susan G., over on Daily Kos, waxes indignant over the president’s imaginary transgressions, strikes a pose of death-defying resolve, and formally spurns the protection of her own government.

Mr. Bush, I’ve decided the price is too high for my conscience. If Gitmo – and the torture and denial of due process accompanying it – is a necessary part of protecting me, I hereby officially release you from the obligation. I’m opting out of this protection racket you’ve set up. Think of me as just one less tile on the human shield you’ve created, using the safety and fear of American citizens to hide behind while you seize more power.

After years of soul-searching, I’ve decided to take my chances in a risky and unpredictable world – one from which your administration can’t fully insulate me anyway, even with the best of intentions – than to live my life duct-taped and “safe” in a wire-tapped American closet where I’m not free to tell you I think you’re a nincompoop and a danger to humankind…

Stop trying to terrorize me with Islamic boogeymen…

Unlike an apparent majority of American voters, I don’t think membership in our national cult of exceptionalism has automatically exempted me from personal death. The fact that I was born on a certain continent in a certain era does not automatically signal to me that nothing bad – especially dying – will befall me.

I can live with the fact that someday I will die, no matter how many of my “freedoms” you take away. Please, direct your future energies toward protecting those who think denial of death and bargaining away the raucous, electrically vivid and unpredictable present moment is a wonderful way to live a life. Count me out…

no matter how many rights you take away from me, you can’t protect me from my biggest fear: You.

Exactly of what rights Mr. Bush may have deprived this lady is unclear. Certainly her right to indulge in adolescent displays of self importance appears untouched. Her right to throw around wild accusations seems completely intact. And her fuzzy-thinking privileges appear inviolate.

If the lady has any genuine complaints, they ought to be directed at the Left, of whose pathological culture of ersatz self-righteousness and perpetual indignation she is obviously a disastrous product.

Edward Everett Hale, during another time when many Americans were indulging in public expressions of disloyalty (1863), published his famous story The Man Without a Country. I wonder if Susan G. has ever read it.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch thinks it should, and may, happen.

The Anchoress takes on the Times leak theme. A lot of blogs, including this one, have commented on the obvious connection between yesterday’s news of large-scale disposable cell-phone purchases by suspicious persons in a variety of cities and last month’s New York Times’ story on secret NSA communications surveillance, but no matter how many of these you have already read, you’ll still want to take the time to read this one. I see 23 trackbacks already, but I’m adding another.

link

Name & Product provided.

Confederate Yankee reports the latest Republican measures to protect National Security.

The BBC reports that the Crown Prosecution Service has decided not to pursue the case for homophobic remarks brought by the Thames Valley Police against 21 year-old Oxford University student Sam Brown, who in unexplained circumstances said to an officer: “Excuse me, do you realise your horse is gay?”

Mr. Brown was arrested under section 5 of the Public Order Act. He was jailed overnight, and declined to pay an 80 pound fine, which resulted in the referral of the case for prosecution.

The CIA had good evidence of Zawahiri’s presence in a Pakistani location, and called in a Hellfire missile strike fired by Predator drone aircraft earlier today. News reports indicate, so far, that seventeen people were killed, and three houses destroyed. Pakistani officials are being quoted as saying five al Qaeda members are dead, and estimating a 50/50 chance that Zawahiri is among the casualties.

William Tate, writing in the American Thinker, notes the Times’ partisan double-standard on Executive branch electronic surveillance:

The controversy following revelations that U.S. intelligence agencies have monitored suspected terrorist related communications since 9/11 reflects a severe case of selective amnesia by the New York Times and other media opponents of President Bush. They certainly didn’t show the same outrage when a much more invasive and indiscriminate domestic surveillance program came to light during the Clinton administration in the 1990’s. At that time, the Times called the surveillance “a necessity.”

The BBC reports a story (subscription-only) in the Economist of a map purchased from a Shanghai dealer in 2001, which purports to be 1763 copy of a map originally dated 1418. The original, if established to be authentic, would cause a great deal of revising by Western historians of the chronology of the Age of Discovery, since the Chinese map claims discovery of the New World by China.

The precise number and actual extent of the voyages of Chinese Admiral Zheng He are not reliably known, but the possibility that he may have journeyed as far as the Americas exists and has given rise to considerable argument and speculation.
————————————————————————————————————————More Zheng He information here, here, and here.

When you see one of these over Manhattan, Washington, or San Francisco, be sure to thank the New York Times for publishing its December expose of NSA surveillance of terrorist communications.

Terrorists read the papers too, and have responded to the Timely warning by switching to disposable cell phones. ABC News reports today:

(1/13/06) – Federal agents have launched an investigation into a surge in the purchase of large quantities of disposable cell phones by individuals from the Middle East and Pakistan, ABC News has learned.

The phones which do not require purchasers to sign a contract or have a credit card have many legitimate uses, and are popular with people who have bad credit or for use as emergency phones tucked away in glove compartments or tackle boxes. But since they can be difficult or impossible to track, law enforcement officials say the phones are widely used by criminal gangs and terrorists.

“There’s very little audit trail assigned to this phone. One can walk in, purchase it in cash, you don’t have to put down a credit card, buy any amount of minutes to it, and you don’t, frankly, know who bought this,” said Jack Cloonan, a former FBI official who is now an ABC News consultant.

Law enforcement officials say the phones were used to detonate the bombs terrorists used in the Madrid train attacks in March 2004.

“The application of prepaid phones for nefarious reasons, is really widespread. For example, the terrorists in Madrid used prepaid phones to detonate the bombs in the subway trains that killed more than 200 people,” said Roger Entner, a communications consultant.

The FBI is closely monitoring the potentially dangerous development, which came to light following recent large-quantity purchases in California and Texas, officials confirmed.

In one New Year’s Eve transaction at a Target store in Hemet, Calif., 150 disposable tracfones were purchased. Suspicious store employees notified police, who called in the FBI, law enforcement sources said.

In an earlier incident, at a Wal-mart store in Midland, Texas, on December 18, six individuals attempted to buy about 60 of the phones until store clerks became suspicious and notified the police. A Wal-mart spokesperson confirmed the incident.

The Midland, Texas, police report dated December 18 and obtained by ABC News states: “Information obtained by MPD [Midland Police Department] dispatch personnel indicated that approximately six individuals of Middle-Eastern origin were attempting to purchase an unusually large quantity of tracfones (disposable cell phones with prepaid minutes attached).” At least one of the suspects was identified as being from Iraq and another from Pakistan, officials said.

“Upon the arrival of officers, suspects were observed moving away from the registers appearing to evade detection while ridding themselves of the merchandise.”

Other reports have come in from other cities, including Dallas, and from authorities in other states. Authorities in Pennsylvania, New York and other parts of Texas confirmed that they were alerted to the cases, and sources say other jurisdictions were also notified.

Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona entered the race for House Majority Leader today. And a group including many of the most repected bloggers on the Political Right issued the following statement addressed to House Republicans:

An Appeal from Center-Right Bloggers
We are bloggers with boatloads of opinions, and none of us come close to agreeing with any other one of us all of the time. But we do agree on this: The new leadership in the House of Representatives needs to be thoroughly and transparently free of the taint of the Jack Abramoff scandals, and beyond that, of undue influence of K Street.

We are not naive about lobbying, and we know it can and has in fact advanced crucial issues and has often served to inform rather than simply influence Members.

But we are certain that the public is disgusted with excess and with privilege. We hope the Hastert-Dreier effort leads to sweeping reforms including the end of subsidized travel and other obvious influence operations. Just as importantly, we call for major changes to increase openness, transparency and accountability in Congressional operations and in the appropriations process.

As for the Republican leadership elections, we hope to see more candidates who will support these goals, and we therefore welcome the entry of Congressman John Shadegg to the race for Majority Leader. We hope every Congressman who is committed to ethical and transparent conduct supports a reform agenda and a reform candidate. And we hope all would-be members of the leadership make themselves available to new media to answer questions now and on a regular basis in the future.

Signed,

N.Z. Bear, The Truth Laid Bear
Hugh Hewitt, HughHewitt.com
Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit.com
Kevin Aylward, Wizbang!
La Shawn Barber, La Shawn Barber’s Corner
Lorie Byrd, Polipundit
Jeff Goldstein, Protein Wisdom
John Hawkins, Right Wing News
John Hinderaker, Power Line
Jon Henke / McQ / Dale Franks, QandO
James Joyner, Outside The Beltway
Mike Krempasky, Redstate.org
Michelle Malkin, MichelleMalkin.com
Ed Morrissey, Captain’s Quarters
Scott Ott, Scrappleface
John Donovan / Bill Tuttle, Castle Argghhh

And I would ask Republicans to make sure that the clean-up includes some of those undoubtedly eminently deserving democrats as well.

Signed,
David Zincavage, Never Yet Melted

Bill Joy reveals:

“We went over to Steve’s house, and he was sitting under a tree with no shoes on reading How to make a Nuclear Bomb,” McNealy said.

The BBC informs us of the latest enviromental threat:

Scientists in Germany have discovered that ordinary plants produce significant amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which helps trap the sun’s energy in the atmosphere.

The findings, reported in the journal Nature, have been described as “startling”, and may force a rethink of the role played by forests in holding back the pace of global warming.

—————————————————————-

Ronald Reagan actually joked about trees as a source of pollution twenty-five years ago, and the clueless left took his quip as a mark of ignorance. They still use that quotation in attacks today.

Ezio Capizzano

The British Telegraph reports:

A 70-year-old Italian law professor has discovered a new career writing erotic memoirs after losing his university job following accusations that he offered students high marks for sex.

Ezio Capizzano, a former law teacher at Camerino University in central Italy, gives detailed accounts of his amorous “tutorials” in the book, The Last Baron In A Campus of Tulips, published this week.

When it emerged in 2002 that he had video-taped his “one-to-one” tutorials he became a household name in Italy and a role model for ageing Casanovas. Far from condemning him, the media lauded Prof Capizzano.

The respected Corriere della Sera newspaper described him as “Italy’s answer to Sean Connery”.

In 2004 he was acquitted of any wrongdoing after the court accepted his claim that the students had all given their full consent.

And Anza.it predicts Video sex romp account set for best-seller list :

Camerino, January 10 – A university lecturer sacked for secretly filming sex sessions with students has told all in his first book .

Law professor Ezio Capizzano, dubbed ‘the porno prof’ by the Italian media, gives lavish details of his amorous encounters in the book, which he has called The Last Baron In A Campus of Tulips .

In Italian, ‘barone’ means a tenured professor with a lot of clout .

The book, which looks set for the best-seller lists, also contains excerpts of letters from students as well as Capizzano’s musings on philosophy and religion .

The lecturer in agrarian and commercial law lost his job in this small Marche town after his sex videos found their way onto newsstands, sparking a nationwide scandal. Despite the apparent evidence against him, Capizzano was cleared in June 2004 of obtaining sexual favours in exchange for boosting grades .

“I’d do it all again,” he said after the judgement came down .

John Hinderaker at Power Line quotes the article below, containing news you won’t find in the New York Times.

The mainstream U.S. media outlets have failed to report a major terrorist plot against the U.S. – because it would tend to support President Bush’s use of NSA domestic surveillance, according to media watchdog groups.

News of a planned attack masterminded by three Algerians operating out of Italy was widely reported outside the U.S., but went virtually unreported in the American media.

Italian authorities recently announced that they had used wiretaps to uncover the conspiracy to conduct a series of major attacks inside the U.S.

Italian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said the planned attacks would have targeted stadiums, ships and railway stations, and the terrorists’ goal, he said, was to exceed the devastation caused by 9/11.

Italian authorities stepped up their internal surveillance programs after July’s terrorist bombings in London. Their domestic wiretaps picked up phone conversations by Algerian Yamine Bouhrama that discussed terrorist attacks in Italy and abroad.

Italian authorities arrested Bouhrama on November 15 and he remains in prison. Authorities later arrested two other men, Achour Rabah and Tartaq Sami, who are believed to be Bouhrama’s chief aides in planning the attacks.

The arrests were a major coup for Italian anti-terror forces, and the story was carried in most major newspapers from Europe to China.

“U.S. terror attacks foiled,” read the headline in England’s Sunday Times. In France, a headline from Agence France Presse proclaimed, “Three Algerians arrested in Italy over plot targeting U.S.”

Curiously, what was deemed worthy of a worldwide media blitz abroad was virtually ignored by the U.S. media, and conservative media watchdog groups are saying that is no accident.

“My impression is that the major media want to use the NSA story to try and impeach the president,” says Cliff Kincaid, editor of the Accuracy in Media Report published by the grassroots Accuracy in Media organization.

“If you remind people that terrorists actually are planning to kill us, that tends to support the case made by President Bush. They will ignore any issue that shows that this kind of [wiretapping] tactic can work in the war on terror.”

“The mainstream media have framed the story as one of the nefarious President Bush ‘spying on U.S. citizens,’ where the average American is a victim not a beneficiary,” commented Brent Baker, vice president of the Media Research Center, a Washington, D.C.-based organization dedicated to encouraging balanced news coverage, “so journalists have little interest in any evidence that the program has helped save lives by uncovering terrorist plans.”

The Associated Press version of the story did not disclose that the men planned to target the U.S. Nor did it report that the evidence against the suspects was gathered via a wiretapping surveillance operation.

Furthermore, only one American newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, is known to have published the story that the AP distributed. It ran on page A-6 under the headline “Italy Charges 3 Algerians.” The Inquirer report also made no mention of the plot to target the U.S. – although foreign publications included this information in the headlines and lead sentences of their stories. Nor did it advise readers that domestic wiretaps played a key role in nabbing the suspected terrorists.

One obvious question media critics are now raising: Did the American media intentionally ignore an important story because it didn’t fit into their agenda of attacking President George Bush for using wiretapping to spy on potential terrorists in the U.S.?

“It’s clear to me,” says AIM’s Kincaid, “that they’re trying their best to make this NSA program to be an impeachable offense, saying it is directed at ordinary Americans. That’s why they keep referring to this as a ‘program of spying on Americans’ – whereas the president keeps pointing out it’s a program designed to uncover al-Qaida operations on American soil.”

Anybody with two brain cells to rub together ought to be able to tell that the sophister, calculator, and economist community is talking rot when you get this kind of story:

Writing in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, the scientists say that more than 60 closely related frog and toad species have vanished from the tropical forests of Latin America during the last few decades, partly because of warming temperatures. The team says this is the first time such a connection has been made.

The research team found a “near lock-step (link) between the timing of losses and changes in climate,” said lead scientist Alan Pounds of the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve and Tropical Science Center in Costa Rica. “It’s a very striking pattern, and it’s hard to find another explanation for it.”

In the first place, we know they’re lying through their teeth, because the vanishing batrachian meme has been a standard Global Warming talking point for a couple of years.

Secondly, do you really believe that scientists are God, sitting on a cloud at MIT, Harvard, and CalTech, keeping an effective eye on every living species in every remote and inhospitable wilderness on earth? Who exactly has been counting, for decades, no less, 60 species of swamp and jungle dwelling frogs and toads? The reality is, no doubt, that some grad student went out twice and counted the frogs and toads to be found in a convenient Latin American one quarter acre somewhere, and then they sat down and started figuring.

Statistical analyses can be designed to prove any thesis you want, since you are always in a position to pick your own assumptions. Unfortunately, reality tends to operate on unknown bases and principles. Simpleton environmentalists believe in a pre-human, pre-lapsarian perfect order of an ideal balance of Nature, but Nature is not like that at all. Nature is always a feast or famine situation. Species are so numerous they darken the sky one day, and then they crash and become rarities. Back in grandfather’s day, a Canada goose was an uncommon trophy, and black ducks and canvasbacks were the staple Eastern wildfowling fare. Today, Canada geese are a non-migratory nuisance species, who’ve developed a penchant for office parks and golf courses, and you get more shots at wood ducks than you do at black ducks or cans.

If frogs and toads are in decline somewhere, you can bet that something else is on the rise. Our amphibian friends have been around a long time, longer than we have, and you can count on them staging a comeback sooner or later.

Mark Steyn, writing in the Australian, remarks:

One day, the world will marvel at the environmental hysteria of our time, and the deeply damaging corruption of science in the cause of an alarmist cult. The best thing this week’s conference could do is inculcate a certain modesty, not least in Senator Ian Campbell, about an issue that is almost entirely speculative. We don’t know how or why climate changes. We do know it’s changed dramatically throughout the planet’s history, including the so-called “little Ice Age” beginning in 600, when I was still driving a Ford Oxcart, and that, by comparison, the industrial age has been a time of relative climate stability. But, of course, as with that “hockey stick”, it depends how you draw the graph.

Question: Why do most global warming advocates begin their scare statistics with “since 1970”?

As in, “since 1970” there’s been global surface warming of half a degree or so.

Because from 1940 to 1970, temperatures fell.

Greg Richards on American Thinker quotes Winston Churchill, writing in The River War (1899), his account of Kitchener’s campaign against the jihadists of that day, on Islam:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property — either as a child, a wife, or a concubine — must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science — the science against which it had vainly struggled — the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

From: jason@kottke.org
Subject: Powerbook support
Date: January 10, 2006 4:55:31 PM ET
To: Apple Tech Support

Hello,

I purchased a new Powerbook three weeks ago. It was working fine until a few hours ago when you announced the new Intel-powered MacBook Pro at MacWorld and I started to cry. “Four to fives times faster,” I sobbed, “a built-in iSight, and a brighter, wider screen.”

My display, while not as bright or large as the new MacBook Pro display, illuminated my wet cheeks and red, swollen eyes as my tears rained down on the backlit keyboard. An acrid smell rose up from inside the smooth metal machine as my salty tears joined with the electronics, joyfully releasing the electrons from their assigned silicon pathways to freely arc into forbidden areas of the computer and elsewhere, including, somewhat painfully, my hands.

Is this covered under my warranty and if so, can you send me a new MacBook Pro as a replacement, please? Thank you for your time,

-jason

link

Here is the theory of governance advanced by the New York Times reporter James Risen, explaining (to Katie Couric on the Today Show) why the Times’ 12/16 NSA terrorist surveillance story had to be published:

RISEN: Well, I—I think that during a period from about 2000—from 9/11 through the beginning of the Gulf—the war in Iraq, I think what happened was you—we—the checks and balances that normally keep American foreign policy and national security policy towards the center kind of broke down. And you had more of a radicalization of American foreign policy in which the—the—the career professionals were not really given a chance to kind of forge a consensus within the administration. And so you had the—the—the principles (sic)—Rumsfeld, Cheney and Tenet and Rice and many others—who were meeting constantly, setting policy and really never allowed the people who understand—the experts who understand the region to have much of a say.

COURIC: You suggest there were a lot of power-grabbing going on.

Mr. RISEN: Yes.

Mr. Risen clearly subscribes to an idiosyncratic school of Constitutionalism in which real governing authority is based upon “expertise” and “centrism,” and reposes in the hands of career bureaucrats, who are entitled to take drastic measures (even compromising National Security by leaking to the Press, if necessary) to defend their policy-making prerogative against usurpation by mere temporarily elected amateurs. Michael Barone also had some sarcastic things to say about this on Monday.
—————————————————————————————-

The Times was not inhibited from proceeding with this story, either by a request to refrain from publishing information injurious to National Security in time of war by the President of the United States, or by consideration of the questionable motives and psychological health of their informant Mr. Tice.

Tice, Risen, the New York Times and its editor and publisher have all committed very serious crimes.